Developing relations with the movements and broader European radical
left

Richard Dunphy and Luke March

Introduction
It was intrinsic to the EL's founding ethos that it was a bottom-up ‘networking party’ – aiming for the ‘integration of working groups and actors of all kinds’ in order to ‘open politics to citizens, and to carry through common demands by coordinated action’ (European Left, 2010b ). This networking identity was a natural result of the inclinations of EL founder parties such as the PRC and Synaspismós, which were central participants in the global justice movement via the European Social Forums; after all, this movement can be conceptualised as a

7
The UDF in the 1990s: the break-up
of a party confederation
Nicolas Sauger
The right
The UDF in the 1990s
Introduction
The principal dynamic of the French party system under the Fifth
Republic has been that of the so-called ‘bipolar quadrille’. By the end
of the 1970s, four parties of approximately equal strength were monopolising over 90 per cent of the vote in their respective left and right
blocs (Parodi, 1989). Nevertheless, this end-state had taken twenty years
to produce, concluding in 1978 with the formation of the UDF. The
UDF managed to create an

financial speculation.
The class conflict and political polarisation at the heart of the 1995
strikes appeared to confound orthodox analyses which saw late twentieth-century France as a society of consensus and institutional stability
(Furet et al., 1988). This polarisation, however, was expressed almost
exclusively outside the major political parties. Yet the political system
91
92
The left
itself, despite the turbulence of intra-party relations, underlined by a
series of splits from the RPR and UDF in the wake of the left’s return
to power in 1997, appeared

and even fuelled by debates about the appropriate role for national divergence (‘sovereignty’) versus allegiance to the EU's common transnational rules (in particular the indivisibility of the ‘four freedoms’ of the EU's single market – freedom of goods, capital, services and labour).
Since the 1970s, a critical prism through which debates over intergovernmentalism versus transnationalism have been seen is the EU party system. From the outset, the EU institutions (above all the European Parliament (EP)) contained the nucleus of a nascent

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2 Into the Party structure:
the communist children’s movement
We Young Pioneers are gay,
In the day of struggle;
For the foe is up today;
But he’ll be down tomorrow.
Chorus: The way to freedom is our goal,
The struggle is our brother;
The world is like a sailing boat,
And we are at its rudder.1
The task of grooming the communist child extended beyond the confines of the
communist home. From age ten during the 1920s and age nine from the early
1930s, children became eligible to join the communist children’s organisation,
the

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8
Ross McKibbin: class cultures,
the trade unions and the Labour Party
John Callaghan
The work of the historian is always a complex and heterogeneous aggregate of
theories, narrative, interpretation and analysis. Such originality as it possesses lies
more often than not in the distinctive pattern which the historian gives to the
components of his or her work, rather than the components themselves, many of
which may be found elsewhere. The three books by Ross McKibbin which form the
focus of this chapter raise

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10
Too much pluralism, not enough socialism:
interpreting the unions–party link
Steve Ludlam
A central object of Labour’s re-branding as ‘New Labour’ was to distance it from
its trade union affiliates (Gould 1998: 257–8). The relationship was tense before
and after the 1997 election, when Blair reduced the unions’ formal power in the
party, and restricted employment policy initiatives largely to his predecessors’
promises (Ludlam 2001). But discontent was limited by real union gains, and tension eased markedly between

up to the new responsibilities which have
recently been placed at their feet.
Structure and membership
The democratic formality of the party is an attempt to save the
Greens from oligarchic tendencies as well as to establish the following
principles: free engagement, enshrined in membership regulations;
free expression within the party, to fight against the tendency of the
individual to disappear under the force of militancy; and the revitalisation
of democratic practice, in particular participatory democracy. The
56
The Greens: from idealism to pragmatism
57

The election of Labour leaders and deputy leaders by the Electoral College

Andrew Denham, Andrew S. Roe-Crines and Peter Dorey

The period of Foot’s leadership that began in November 1980 was one of ‘unremitting gloom’ for the Labour Party and ended in June 1983 with its lowest share of the vote in any general election since 1918 (Heppell, 2010a : 89–90). In this chapter, we examine the election of Labour leaders and deputy leaders by the Electoral College from its creation in 1981 until 2010, when it was used for the last time. Before doing so, we first explain why Labour’s previous system of leadership selection by the PLP alone came under increasing attack in the 1970s and how its

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2
‘What kind of people are you?’ Labour, the
people and the ‘new political history’
Lawrence Black
Like their subject, historians of Labour have tended to be attached to tradition and
sceptical of novelty – in short, rather conservative. Newer tendencies are nonetheless evident. These result, in part, from changes in Labour. New Labour’s constitutional reforms, its engagement with issues of national identity and communication
skills have been concurrent with recent work on the party’s past in such areas
(Chadwick 1999